Shorter Than The Day
by gutter.xromance
Summary: Jack Frost's relationship with the Grim Reaper was... complicated to say the least. A series of linked shorts that traverses the decades and centuries of their relationship, whether together or seperate. Jack/OC


**Shorter Than The Day**

_Because I could not stop for Death – _  
_He kindly stopped for me – _  
_The Carriage held but just Ourselves – _  
_And Immortality..._

_... Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet_  
_Feels shorter than the Day_  
_I first surmised the Horses' Heads _  
_Were toward Eternity –_  
- Emily Dickinson

"I wanted this one, you know."

The woman's voice, soft as a sigh, was what woke him up. She must have been close because her words sounded as though she had whispered them in his ear, but he could not hear the sound of her footsteps around him. He heard the wind howling through the branches, the shift of fabric as she moved, and on top that, the overture of a thousand shifting feathers. He was fully aware of everything around him, but could not remember how he came to be here or… anything for that matter. Why couldn't he remember?

"His soul was _so_ pretty, so bright and pure. Not surprised he died the way he did." She sounded almost… disappointed.

Died? Did she say he had _died?_ Maybe that was why he couldn't remember anything, because he was dead. But, if he was dead, then why could he still hear, and he was breathing!

He wanted to move, to open his eyes and see who was speaking, but his body was not complying with his mind's demands. She must have been beautiful, he decided then, with a voice like hers, it had a bell-like quality to it, that for every word she spoke there was a soft, reverent echo. But to whom was she speaking? As far as he could tell, there was no one else around them – could she have been speaking to him?

"You always keep the best ones for yourself." Probably not speaking to him, then.

Suddenly the quiet forest filled with a cacophony of ruffling feathers, then agitated wing beats, and finally a chorus of shrill crow calls. The sound surrounded them, swelled into the air as if they were agreeing with the woman's sentiment. It echoed through the woods as the bird calls rang, almost painfully, in his ears.

"Shush, all of you! And be gone, this is none of your concern! You have work to do, yet!" Her voice held the tone of a mother speaking impatiently to her children.

He had an image in his head of her suddenly throwing out an arm to scare away the winged creatures and it must have worked because suddenly the air filled with the creaking of branches as the crows prepared for their ascent. The sound they made as they took to the air, there must have been hundreds of them taking flight. The wing beats of the crows played a rushed staccato against the breeze.

"Now then, back to the matter at hand. Open your eyes, child, I know you can hear me."

Slowly, he opened his eyes, blinking away the darkness and colored spots, but when he tried to move, he found that he still could not. Looking around he saw himself suspended in the air, his bare feet barely brushing against the frozen surface of the pond beneath him. When he looked above him, he found himself staring at the full moon larger than he'd ever seen it; the pale light lit the pond and surrounding area as brightly as if it were the sun. It shone against the snow covered area, the crystal flakes glittering in the light as if the ground was covered by thousands upon thousands of diamonds.

Then he turned his gaze to the woman standing on the ice before him. His first thought was that she didn't look real, quickly followed by the thought that he was right – she was beautiful. She was pale, cloaked in white, her hair the darkest black he'd ever seen; her lips were the color of a red rose in full bloom, the only splash of color about her. But his gaze quickly focused on the dangerous looking weapon she held at her side; a scythe, nearly as tall as she was and the moonlight played along the curved blade, almost in a warning.

"Wh-who a-are you?" he asked, and his voice sounded weak and worn, his throat was dry as sand.

She was quiet a moment as she appraised him from head to toe, and everything about her was disconcertingly still. She did not fidget and shift as most people would, but stood as still as the frozen pond's surface. He swallowed hard as he looked at her, the steadiness of her gaze raising the hair all along his arms, and at the back of his neck.

"I have known many names," she said at length, "but you may call me Theda."

"Why can't I move?" he demanded.

Theda moved the scythe to her other hand as she took a step towards him. "Because some people do not take kindly to their new state of being," she replied.

"I don't under…"

_Not surprised he died the way he did. _

_**That's right. She said I had died**_, he thought.

He swallowed again, raised his head to look at Theda once more. She must have been lying! Dead people do not speak, do not hold conversations. But as he looked at her, he saw no shift in her features, only the sympathy and compassion he just noticed had been there the entire time. Releasing a quiet sigh, Theda waved her hand and for a moment, he was weightless before he fell to his knees on the icy pond; however, the ice showed no sign of his impact, it did not crack and splinter as it should have.

A moment later, Theda was crouched in front of him, her scythe laid out beside her on the ice. He wondered, for a moment, if this situation, the fact that she could see him and speak to him, meant that she was dead as well.

"I am not dead, at least, not in the same sense that you are," Theda told him – had he asked her aloud? But before he could say anything, she asked him, "Do you remember how you died?"

He tried to think, tried to remember but he could not drag anything to the surface of his mind. He could feel himself begin to panic, feel a heart that no longer needed to beat bang against the caging of his ribs, and the corners of his eyes began to burn. Then, just as he was going to bury his face into his shaking hands, Theda's hand stretched out toward him, placing the gloved palm of her hand gently over his heart.

"Look at me," Theda said quietly, her voice more of a request than a demand.

He did, lifting his gaze to meet hers finding that even they lacked color. They were dark as the night sky, allowing him to see himself reflected perfectly in the expanse of her gaze. Eternity condensed itself into a bat of her eyelashes, and the blink of an eye seemed to stretch for a thousand years as Theda searched his eyes. For a moment, time seemed to stand still as life filled Theda's dead eyes in the form of a muted brown and suddenly –

"_Jack, I'm scared!" _

- Jack remembered how he had died.

Theda tore her hand away abruptly, cradling against her chest as if she had been burnt. Jack himself scrambled back from her, his chest heaving as he tried to catch the breath that he didn't really need. But he remembered now, he had saved his sister's life, not realizing until it was too late that he had taken her place on the patch of thin ice. Jack remembered the crack of the ice, the sound that reminded him of breaking glass and the crash of water around him as he fell, the biting cold feeling like a million needles sticking him at once.

"If I'm dead," Jack began, "how are we talking?"

Theda breathed an impatient sigh as she closed the distance between them once again, crouching on the ice before him. Jack watched her as she considered him with her unblinking stare, desperately trying to fight the urge he felt to shift and fidget. Theda said nothing for the longest time, and as she looked at him Jack felt as though his soul was bare before him, all of his secrets laid out in front of him for her to see. What did she want from him, anyway? Had she been the one to awaken him, like a witch that his mother used to warn him about when he was a child.

Abruptly, a smile stretched itself across Theda's lips as a laugh filled the space between them. "You think I'm a witch!" she laughed, but the emotion never reached her eyes. Maybe she was blind?

"You can read my mind?" he demanded loudly, feeling suddenly very violated.

She shook her head. "I can _hear_ your thoughts, there is a difference."

"How does that prove you're not a witch!?"

The playful expression melted almost immediately from Theda's face and she was back to being serious once again. With a sigh she turned away from him. "A thousand lifetimes and this never gets any easier when someone doesn't understand," she mumbled to herself.

"What?" Jack wondered.

But her attention wandered from him to the glowing orb hung in the night sky. "I can handle this, thank you very much!" she told the… moon?

Jack instantly decided that this girl was crazy. She had to have been, she could read his mind and she was talking to the moon! Theda was clearly a few feathers short of a duck and rowing whatever boat she was on with only one oar. Briefly, he wondered how far he could scoot backwards before she would notice.

With another sigh, Theda turned back to him. "I am not a witch," she reiterated. "I was here to… collect you."

"Collect me! What do you mean collect me! Are you trying to tell me that you collect dead bodies or something?" he cried. He tried not to imagine someone collecting dead bodies, but still his mind conjured the idea that she lived in a large mausoleum that housed hundreds of rows of coffins.

But Theda shook her head again, and where Jack was sure that someone else would display impatience, she only looked faintly amused. "Not your body, Jack, _your soul_."

Jack knew Theda saw the confusion as it wrote itself across his expression. His… soul? Why would Theda have come to collect his soul? It couldn't have been a very valuable collectable, only eighteen years old, hardly as valuable as an old man's who lived a hundred years. It had no real life experiences, scarred by only one heartbreak when the girl he'd had an infatuation with accepted the proposal of another. It had never left the village he had grown up in.

When he looked at Theda again, he knew she was not going to tell him, she was going to let him figure it out for himself. And admittedly, it took him a while, but another glance at the scythe lying harmlessly beside her and the pieces all fell and clicked into place.

"You're… the Grim Reaper." It was not a question.

He could not help the slight shake in his tone. Here was a myth made real before him, a myth everyone had been lead to believe was terrifying, and a figure of nightmares. In reality, Theda was kind and soft spoken. He wondered if she had ever been human because despite her appearance, nothing about her was even slightly mortal.

Theda rolled her eyes. "I _hate_ that name," she breathed through her teeth, "but yes, you have the general idea."

A dawning realization came over Jack and with it, the anger that began to churn in his chest. He felt his expression twist and contort into something dark as he looked at her, but Theda for her part seemed unfazed by the sudden change in his demeanor. Jack forced himself to his feet and she rose with him, picking up her scythe once again as he began to pace. The look on her face had changed, he realized, it was calculating as much as it was curious, as if she was wondering what he was going to do as much as she was preparing for his decision and whatever action he took.

Finally, once he had organized his thoughts, Jack rounded on her. "Are you the reason I'm dead!?" he shouted at her. "Are you the one that killed me!?"

He expected her to startle, take a step back, or at least have the decency to look concerned, but all Theda did was shake her head. "No, contrary to the belief, I have no control over when or how someone dies. The only thing I can say is that yours was unexpected, but then again, The Self-Sacrifice usually is."

"Self-Sacrifice?"

"Indeed," Theda said with a nod. "You saved your sister at the cost of your own life – she was the one meant to die today, not you."

At the mention of his sister, Jack felt all the anger and fervor leak out of his body and puddle at his feet. The thought that his baby sister was the one meant to die… he couldn't even fathom it. And well, if it meant that his sister would be able to live a long, full life, then Jack was happy to have taken her place.

Jack took a deep breath, a feeble attempt to gather up all of his courage before he looked back at Theda, the Grim Reaper. "Am I… am I going with you, then?" he wondered, his voice quieter than usual.

He wished he could make sense of the sad smile that turned up the corners of her mouth, or the twisting feeling that settled in his stomach when he saw it. Theda's brow crinkled, sadness filled the dark depths of her eyes before she set her scythe to stand on its own at her side.

"No, you are not coming with me," she said, and in a few strides swallowed the distance between them. "I'm sorry."

The panic Jack thought he had swallowed returned two-fold. The idea that Theda might leave him alone on this frozen pond, the very spot where he had died _terrified_ him. What was he to do then? Wander the world lost and alone, a restless spirit for all eternity.

Jack blinked, refocused his gaze on Theda when he felt her knuckles brush across his cheek. "Shh, quiet your thoughts, Jack," she said gently, almost lovingly. "You are to be burdened with a greater purpose."

Jack didn't want a _greater purpose_. All of a sudden he was so, so tired and all he wanted to do was close his eyes and rest. If he went with Theda, then he could have that rest. She could be a comfort to him, a balm to his suddenly troubled soul, help him come to terms with his fate. The sudden realization that he was to be parted from her, the one who helped him remember how he had come to be here, threw his emotions into a tumult.

Jack took Theda's hand away from his face, bringing her gloved hand between both of his. "I'm scared," he admitted, his voice so quiet he wasn't sure she had heard him.

But Theda smiled at him, like a flower opening to the sun. "I know, but I promise that when you wake up you won't be scared anymore."

This sounded suspiciously like a good-bye. "Am I ever going to see you again?" Jack inquired of her.

"Perhaps someday," she replied softly, giving his hands a reassuring squeeze.

"Will I _remember_ you?"

Her smile turned sad and a heaviness seemed to settle itself over her shoulders as she slowly reclaimed her hand. Jack knew what that meant, if he did ever see Theda again in his next life, he wouldn't remember her. But he needed to hear it from her, if she was taking away his chance at a peaceful afterlife; he needed her to tell him.

"You always were clever, Jack," Theda said with a humorless laugh. Then she took a breath and said, "No, you will not remember me."

"Why?" he demanded.

Theda made a clicking noise with her tongue as though she was finally losing her patience with him. "It's the way it has to be, Jack. And we're wasting time."

Before he could question her, Theda had raised herself to the balls of her feet so her face was level with his. His breath caught in his throat as he looked back at her, and Jack could have sworn there was amusement in the depths of her eyes when she caught him off guard. He dared not move, curious as to what she was going to do, and when she finally did move, Jack couldn't make himself move. Slowly, Theda closed the distance between them inching her face closer to his, and belatedly, Jack realized that her body did not give off any warmth. He felt it there, so close to him, his chest nearly heaving against hers, but it was simply _there._

Theda finally stopped a hair's breadth from his parted mouth and her eyes darted up to his. "Goodbye Jack," she breathed into him, her lips moving against his with every syllable she spoke.

And just as Jack felt Theda's lips softly press against his, everything went black.

.

.

.

_Darkness. _

_That was the first thing he remembered. It was dark, and it was cold… and he was **scared**. But then, he saw the moon. It so big, and so **bright**; it seemed to chase the darkness away. And when it did, he wasn't scared anymore. _

_Why he was there and what he was meant to do, that he's never known and part of him wondered if he ever would. _

_His name was Jack Frost. _

_How did he know that? The Moon told him so… that was all It ever told him. _

_And that was a very long, long time ago. _

* * *

**I actually just saw Rise of The Guardians for the first time last week and I adored it. Since then I've watched it half a dozen times and this idea formed itself in my head!**

**The last segment is the prologue from Rise of The Guardians, but told in third person. Don't sue me, I don't own it! The only thing I own is Theda.**

**Theda is the Grim Reaper, her name is pronounced Thee-da, and is an anagram of DEATH. **

**I have the idea to turn this into a chaptered story, but I'm really going to do that if people are interested in reading it. So for now, it's a one-shot. **

**Let me know what you think! :) **

**-(gxr)- **


End file.
